Karen V. Hansen researches the intersections of kinship, community, and inequalities. Using an historical ethnographic approach, she investigates the collision of two processes in U.S. history — migration and dispossession. In the “Reservation Borderlands” project, she explores how state policies of settler colonialism shaped on-the-ground racial entanglements on Indian reservations on the Northern Great Plains.

Her exploration of the nexus of gender, class, and racial-ethnic inequality also takes her to a late twentieth century encounter. “Coming of Age in Silicon Valley” centers on Sunnyvale High School during a decade of heightened interracial tension. In the 1960s and 1970s, when schools across the country violently and vociferously resisted integration, SHS stands as a case of a working class, multiracial campus. It suffered conflict between groups, but also gave students a chance to develop community. By example and design, it attracted skilled educators and created a culture of involvement that facilitated dialogue across difference.

Professor Hansen has most recently published Encounter on the Great Plains: Scandinavian Settlers and the Dispossession of Dakota Indians, 1890-1930, which has been awarded the 2016 Gita Chaudhuri Book Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. With Anita Ilta Garey she co-edited At the Heart of Work and Family: Engaging the Ideas of Arlie Hochschild. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Swedish Fulbright Commission.

“Care and Kinship: An Introduction” (with Anita Garey, Rosanna Hertz, and Cameron Macdonald) Journal of Family Issues, 23:6 (September 2002): 703-715. As part of this project we solicited articles and edited two special issues of Journal of Family Issues on "Care and Kinship," 23:6 (September) and 23:7 (October).